Postcard · 1980
The first shot of 'The Sound of Young Scotland' — Postcard's founding single, with its giveaway flexi and Porky's hand-etched jokes in the run-out.
Some grails are worth money; this one is worth a whole movement. Falling and Laughing was the very first release on Postcard Records, the label two young men ran out of a flat on West Princes Street in Glasgow in 1980 — Alan Horne, the provocateur with the ideas, and Edwyn Collins, the singer and guitarist of Orange Juice. They gave their tiny operation a motto lifted, with a wink, from Motown: "The Sound of Young Scotland." It sounded absurd for a label with no money and no distribution. Within a few years it looked like prophecy.
The single itself is all nerves and yearning — Collins's voice cracking between irony and romance, the guitars chiming and slightly out of breath, a debt to the Velvet Underground and Chic filtered through Glaswegian self-consciousness. It shouldn't quite work, and that's the charm: this is the sound of a scene inventing itself in real time, too clever and too heartfelt to be cool. Indie-pop — jangling, literate, emotionally naked, made on nothing — begins here.
Everything about it was a statement of intent. Alan Horne modelled Postcard on the great singles labels — the sleeve witty and hand-made, the ambition deliberately outsized — and the music matched: Collins adored the Velvet Underground and the clean funk of Chic in equal measure, and Falling and Laughing tries, endearingly, to be both at once. That collision — art-school nerves meeting a dancefloor it can't quite reach — is the exact recipe a hundred later bands would live off.
What Postcard started in that flat rippled out for decades. The label's brief run (Orange Juice, Josef K, Aztec Camera, the early Go-Betweens) became the template for an entire British independent tradition: the Smiths' romantic jangle, Sarah Records, C86, Belle and Sebastian, the whole idea that a couple of people with a great sleeve and a stronger belief could matter more than a major. Edwyn Collins would later have his own strange second act — a global hit with "A Girl Like You," then a hard-won recovery from illness — but the myth was already sealed here, on Postcard 80-1.
It helps that Orange Juice were genuinely good, not just first. Falling and Laughing has real songwriting under the shambling surface, and Collins's wit — self-mocking, sharp — gave indie-pop its voice as much as its sound. Play it now and you hear how much came after it: every bookish, big-hearted guitar band that chose feeling over force owes this three-minute single a debt.
And it sounds like little else did in 1980: recorded cheaply, the guitars trebly and eager, Collins's voice pitching between a croon and a stumble, the rhythm section propulsive but amateur in the best sense. Where London punk had been all aggression, this was tender and clever and a little embarrassed by its own feelings — a Scottish answer to punk that swapped rage for romance. That emotional register, more than any single guitar sound, is Postcard's real bequest to the decades of indie that came after.
As an object it is beloved out of all proportion to its size, and that devotion is written into the record itself — right down to the jokes the mastering engineer scratched into the run-out. This isn't a grail of grand production or towering ambition; it's a grail of origins, the small, hand-made artefact from which a large and enduring idea grew. For collectors of British independent music, there is no more foundational 7" — the acorn of Young Scotland, and of a great deal more than Scotland.
The founding single of Postcard Records and 'The Sound of Young Scotland' — where indie-pop begins. Not a grail of production but of origins: the 1980 Postcard 80-1 original, with its giveaway flexi and Porky's etched jokes, is one of the most coveted 7"s in British independent music.
Falling and Laughing on Vinyl — Which Pressing?
cat. 80-1 — the label's very first release, and the tells are all about what came bundled with it. Originals were issued with a giveaway flexi-disc, and roughly 200 copies also included a postcard (the label's namesake gimmick). A complete original therefore isn't just the 7": it's the single, the flexi and, on the earliest and most coveted copies, the postcard. Missing pieces drop both the value and the claim to being a true first
hand-etched with the jokes of mastering engineer George "Porky" Peckham — "PORKY... THINGS ARE TOUGH" on one side and "WE CAN STILL PICNIC" on the other. Peckham's scratched messages are a well-known feature of records he cut, and here they double as an authenticity check: read the dead wax before you trust anything else
Postcard was a tiny operation with a short life, so there was no vast pressing run to muddy the waters, but there are later reissues and bootlegs of this famous single. The combination matters: catalogue 80-1, the Porky etchings, and ideally the flexi (and postcard) present. As with any grail of this kind, completeness is most of the value
clean originals sit around a median of ~€578, with complete copies — flexi and postcard intact — at the top. It is firmly in grail territory, one of the most expensive 7" singles in British independent collecting, and the price is really a measure of how much this small record is loved. Treat the figure as an order of magnitude; condition and completeness swing it hard
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What makes a complete original of Falling and Laughing?
The 1980 Postcard 80-1 7" together with its giveaway flexi-disc — and, on roughly the first 200 copies, a postcard. A true first is the whole package; a bare single missing the flexi (and postcard) is worth much less and is a weaker claim to being an original.
How do I authenticate it?
Read the run-out grooves: the original is hand-etched with George 'Porky' Peckham's jokes, 'PORKY... THINGS ARE TOUGH' and 'WE CAN STILL PICNIC.' Combine that with the Postcard 80-1 catalogue and the presence of the flexi (and postcard) before trusting a copy, since the single has been reissued and bootlegged.
Why is it so expensive if it isn't musically 'epic'?
Because its value is historical, not sonic: it's the first Postcard release and the founding artefact of indie-pop and 'The Sound of Young Scotland.' Clean originals sit around a median of ~€578, with complete flexi-and-postcard copies higher. You're paying for origins.
Where might I find one in Glasgow?
A record this tied to the city surfaces in Glasgow's specialist and second-hand shops and at record fairs, where Postcard material occasionally turns up. Buying in person lets you confirm the run-out etchings and whether the flexi and postcard are present.
